Friday, October 31, 2008

So when do you think that significant sales of these CMOS sensors could -- I thought the original target was the second half of next year. Are we able to stick with that target as to when the CMOS sensors start to become a revenue and earnings contributor? Or must we--

Antonio Perez, CEO:

That is the target that we put for ourselves for a significant increase in volume. And that still is the target, Joan.

Joan Lappin - Gramercy Capital:

Okay. So you haven't had to -- no alterations in that.

Antonio Perez:

No.

---

To me this sounds like Joan is a bit skeptical about Kodak being able to achieve its sales target.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Yahoo: Pixelplus revenue for the Q3 of 2008 was $3.7M, compared to $3.1M in Q2 2008, and $3.9M in Q3 2007. Net loss in Q3 2008 was $2.9M, compared to a net loss of $2.3M in Q2 2008, and a net loss of $1.2M in Q3 2007. Gross margin for Q3 2008 was 15.3%, compared to 4.9% in Q2 2008.

The company sold approximately 7.4M image sensors in Q3 2008, which represents an increase of about 0.3M units from its sale of around 7.1M units in Q2 2008.

Pixelplus CEO and President S.K. Lee says: "The economic slowdown in China had a negative impact on our business in the third quarter, and this impact was much greater and broader than we had ever imagined. In response to the unprecedented financial turmoil arising from the Global Financial Crisis and the severe economic burden this has placed on the Asian economies, we continue to adapt to unfavorable market conditions."

Tech-On: Sony announced its financial results for Q2 (July to September) of FY2008. Its operating income plunged 90.1% on year over year basis. Image sensors were cited as one of the fields where income declined more than the average.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Semiconductor International: ST talks about its method for optical inline monitoring of colorization effects on CMOS image sensors in its fab.

Typical defects in the manufacturing process are streaks on the color filter array. They occur after liquid processes, mainly after resist spin-coating steps. A new, automatic and fast optical inspection method for colorization effects was developed by Vistec Semiconductor Systems in collaboration with ST. The successful detection of colorization problems became possible by using an automated macro defect inspection system (Vistec LDS3200) with a combined microscope module and special optimized analysis software. The tool scans a wafer in less than 6 minutes and delivers the inspection result for the full wafer.

Micron just published its FY2008 10-K form. Micron confirms that Aptina already operates as a separate entity: "We are exploring partnering arrangements with outside parties regarding the separation of our Aptina Imaging business to an independent entity in which we would retain a significant minority ownership interest. To that end, we began operating our Imaging business as a separate, wholly-owned, subsidiary in October 2008."

EETimes comes with a post-mortem article on Magnachip exiting image sensor business. Nothing new is there, just re-iteration that the company is in a difficult cash position and it has no choice but to make the hard decisions.

Digitimes also repeats the same info. These reports are mostly based on Magnachip announcement of its Q3'08 results (Yahoo).

Tech-On: Panasonic has developed a 3D range sensor that uses a CCD and can be used at 100,000lux illumination. The range sensor irradiates a signal light on the measurement target and observes the reflected light. In extremely bright ambient light such as direct sunlight, the CCD sensor is saturated with only the ambient light, making it almost impossible to detect the signal light.

In the new sensor, the electric charge corresponding to that generated by the ambient light is removed from the charge generated in the photosensitive unit so that only the charge generated by the reflected light remains. I assume it uses some sort of fast gating to minimize the stray ambient light influence. The 3D CCD resolution is 16x120.

Digitimes: Varioptic is to close its Taiwan branch office, because its "liquid lens solutions are not competitive with conventional VCM (voice coil motor) auto-focus devices in terms of price, according to the branch office."

Yahoo: SMIC announces 0.11um CIS technology. The new process is available with both aluminum and copper metalization, which can be manufactured on 200mm and 300mm wafers - looks like too many options to me. SMIC says it has begun 0.11um pilot production for its customers.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Dpreview Forum: Dick Merrill (1949-2008) brought to the table many of the ideas behind the Foveon X3 imager, which he co-invented with Dick Lyon, who was able to see a concept among many of Dick Merrill's patents. Together with Dick Lyon and Carver Mead, Dick Merrill was one of the founders of Foveon. In 2005, these three were awarded the Progress Medal for this work by the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain.

Dick was a warm and wonderful person and someone who took great pleasure in his passion and the photographic images it provided. In many ways, he was the spirit within Foveon and, before that, Nat Semi.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Yahoo: Sensata got into image sensors a year and a half ago when it acquired the remains of SmalCamera from Cypress. Today Sensata announced the new Avocet HDR technology based on SmalCamera's Autobrite and now offering a dynamic range up to 154dB.

In SmalCamera's tradition to offer a complete system solution, the new technology is presented in three product configurations: a single box complete solution, Vision Systems Platform (VSP); a standard video camera for 2 box solutions; or as an imaging module for engineers building their own camera. All solution are available with monochrome, RGB or RGBi sensor versions.

Yahoo: ST Micro announces its first automotive HDR sensor targeted for driver assistance systems. This new VL5510 sensor has a 1024x512-pixel format, suitable for wide-angle products. Its specifications include: 5.6um pixel size; sensitivity 7.14V/lux, low dark current of 33aA/pixel at 25C, and high QE at near infra-red, frame rate up to 34fps; video delivered via 12-bit parallel interface or serial interface (RAW 8/10/12 format). Anti dark sun and defect pixel correction algorithms are also integrated, together with an image histogram is embedded in the delivered image. The high dynamic response of the sensor is fully programmable: 10 knee points are available to tune pixel response.

The device is currently sampling and will be in mass production in automotive applications in early 2009. Pricing is expected to be in the range of $20 for bare-die quantities of 10,000 pieces.

Philip Garrou from Semiconductor International anticipates a surge of activity in TSV and 3D integration in image sensors. He summarizes TSV activities by all the leading image sensor makers in his nice blog message from a month ago. A newer post paints a bigger picture where image sensor TSV adoption is just a first step of large scale TSV move.

Yahoo: Japan-based Graphin announced image sensor evaluation suite with MIPI interface. Graphin has completed an evaluation for a D-PHY physical layer compliant with the MIPI standard and created a prototyping system with intellectual properties supporting CSI-2 protocol controls. Graphin is working on the MIPI Advanced Board commercially available in December 2008.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Entertainment technology innovators will be honored by the Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers during an awards presentation at the organization's annual Tech Conference & Expo, Oct. 28-30 at the Renaissance Hotel in Hollywood.

"The Fuji Gold Medal for the design and development of techniques and equipment advancing photographic or electronic image origination will be bestowed on Dr. Albert Theuwissen, professor at Delft University of Technology and founder of Harvest Imaging, for his contributions to R&D and education in the field of solid-state image sensing."

Digitimes reports that Omnivision is in talks with TSMC and PSC to secure wafer capacity in 2009 to help it further expand market share, according to the paper's sources in Taiwan's wafer foundry industry.

Digitimes says that Omnivision is the top vendor of image sensors in the notebook and handset segments. OmniVision is not being complacent and the company has been trying to grab as much as the global market share through capacity support from foundry companies in addition to continuing product innovation, the sources indicated.

Digitimes sources think that Aptina in its push to expand its capacity is likely to approach TSMC and PSC, as they are the two Taiwan-based foundry services companies that have more production capacity and manufacturing expertise in the production of CMOS image sensors. OmniVision aims to stymie Aptina's efforts to build up business relations with TSMC or PSC through its strengthened cooperation with the two companies, speculated the sources.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Mobile Imaging Design Line publishes part three of Tessera's 4-part esse on mobile imaging (parts 1 and 2). Naturally, Wafer Level Package and Wafer Level Camera are named as the important parts of the cost reduction.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

SiOnyx is set up to commercialize the new material discovered by Harward University physicist Eric Mazur. As I understand from the company site "Black Silicon" is a modified material having a narrower than bulk Si bandgap and still compatible with Si process (not necessarily CMOS process). The narrower bandgap allows for higher absorption coefficient for visible light.

It looks like the photodetector is based on photoconductive principle, rather than photodiode, so an additional gain is possible right in the detector itself. The noise would be higher as well, both at low and strong light, but the company does not talk about this so far.

SiOnyx sees a lot of applications for the new photodetector, imaging is one of them. A white paper specifically talks about smaller than 1um pixels, leveraging higher absorption coefficient of Black Silicon.

"BYD has been striving to build up a complete mobile phone OEM industrial chain by integrating its resources. The Shenzhen company has laid out a detailed deployment in segments like power management chip, CMOS image sensor, liquid crystal display (LCD) driver and touch controlled chip."

Rumors that huge Chinese conglomerate BYD enters CIS business have been circulating for a long time now. The first published indication I was able to see is BYD patent application filed in the European PO (freepatentsonline).

BYD has started a 13 years ago from car battery business, then continued on to mobile phone batteries, then to whole mobile phones, then to camera phone modules with sensors from others and now going to CIS business.

By the way, anybody knows what BYD stands for? May be a joke, but I was told it's "Bring Your Dollars".

As said in comments to the previous post, Magnachip's 8K SEC filing reveals the details of the decision to abandon CIS business (Yahoo):

"Effective October 6, 2008, MagnaChip Semiconductor LLC (the "Company") will close its Imaging Solutions business segment, subject to support for existing customers. The Company expects the business segment closure to strengthen its financial performance and allow for continued investment in strategic growth areas.

In connection with this action, the Company will reduce its global workforce by approximately 200 employees, primarily located in the United States and South Korea, and primarily including managerial, engineering, sales, and administrative positions. The departure of terminated employees is expected to be substantially completed by October 31, 2008.

The Company expects to complete final activities associated with the closure by the end of its second fiscal quarter of 2009. The Company anticipates that it will record total restructuring and impairment charges of approximately $54.8 million related to one-time employee termination benefits and impaired assets, as well as expenditures related to the closure of facilities and contract termination costs. Of this amount, approximately $43.6 million relates to non-cash charges and approximately $11.2 million relates to cash expenditures, which is expected to be recognized over the next four fiscal quarters.

As a result, the Company expects costs savings, including reductions in research and development and capital expenditures, of approximately $50.0 million in the Company's fiscal year 2009."

I decided to post it, as I'm getting this rumor from few sources. Here it is, even though there is no official confirmation from Magnachip:

The rumor is that Magnachip is shutting down all its US facilities - Pasadena, San Jose, Phoenix and Seattle offices. Another message says that Magnachip has decided to abandon image sensor business, as for a long time it's unable to get a significant market share and margin. Yet another message says it's a long due decision as image sensor business has quarter after quarter failed to reach its business targets.

Over the years Magnachip assembled a great team in the US. It's a pity, if they really decided to disband it.

A 48M-pixel, 6kx8k, 36x48mm2 full-frame CCD imager was developed for professional digital SLR cameras and digital camera backs. Compared to the previous generation, the pixel size was reduced by 30% from 7.2x7.2um2 to 6.0x6.0 um2 to meet the demands for higher resolution. Still, by improvements in technology and design, the SNR under identical exposure conditions was increased by 30%.

We present a comprehensive study of 3D sequential technology having the capabilities to become a breakthrough in CIS miniaturization. Back-illuminated pinned photodiodes are constructed on SOI, while part of the pixel transistors is processed on a second SOI layer with HfO2/TiN gates at low temperature, targeting low noise levels.

As pixel size of image sensors shrinks down toward 1.0um, we are reaching technical barrier to get the required SNR10 performance. To overcome such a barrier, integration of advanced technologies such as back-side illumination, WC CFA, EDoF technologies, etc. are described and improvement for small pixel size is estimated.

Impress Watch (Google translation): Panasonic started construction of the new image sensors fab in in Tonami City. The fab is scheduled to start operation by mid-2009. Its planned production capacity is 30,000 wafers/month (equiv. 8" wafers). The plant construction investment is about 94B Yen.The plans to build the fab were initially announced in January 2008.

Samsung presented a poster paper "The Effects of Nano-Sized Defects on Dark Current of High End CMOS Image Sensor" on May 2008 Electrochemical Society Meeting. The main claim is that defects in epi layer cause a significant increase in hot pixels. The article compares few epi wafer vendors and shows dark current difference between them.

Saturday, October 04, 2008

DxO's Nicolas Touchard talks about ISP challenges in his presentation on CPIQ forum. The main problem is to keep up with pixel shrink effects, despite a long ISP design cycle. So the modern ISPs are optimized to compensate pixel imperfections that were 2-3 years ago.

I don't completely agree with this view. There are ISP design teams with good connections with sensor vendors and there are others with bad or no connections. The later ones learn pixel effects from literature and naturally have 2-3 years lag. The former ones have quite good understanding of small pixels and their ISP account for all modern pixel effects.

Friday, October 03, 2008

This week the most interesting application comes from Canon. US20080231859 application is supposed to solve most of the small pixel problems, such as reduced sensitivity and low SNR. It achieves the improvement by changing a Bayer RGB filter for a "spectroscopic element formed by means of an optical microresonator".

The bad thing is that I was unable to understand how these resonating cavities made and how they manage to effectively generate photocharge in smaller than wavelength pixels. I've read the description back and forth and I'm still puzzled. Anyway, the promise of this idea is great and if Canon knows how to make it, this would be a huge boost in image quality of small pixels.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

Seeking Alpha's Micron earnings call transcript has few words about Aptina's next stage in life:

Daniel Amir - Lazard Capital Markets:

Just a question on the image sensor business. Can you comment a bit on the visibility there, what you’re seeing there in terms of growth for the next couple of quarter, if at all? And kind of what the strategy is now for the segment?

Steven R. Appleton, CEO:

I wouldn’t say there’s a lot of growth. I think it looks pretty stable. I would say not a lot of growth, not a lot of decline. There are some incremental improvements that we’re making. If you would have noticed, for image sensor companies, they’ve made somewhat of a comeback and I think have gained some market share in the last quarter or two.

But, hey, look, I think that business, a lot of it is in the mobile stage and the technology stage, if you will, around PDAs and digital cameras and PC cams, etc. so I think we have some similar challenges to what other segments do, but it still looks like they’re on a pretty good path.

In terms of what we’re intending to do in that space, there hasn’t been any change of plans with respect to what’s happening with that Aptina. In fact, on this Friday they will start operating as a separate company from Micron, although it will be a wholly-owned subsidiary they will have their own systems and so forth, and we’re still moving down the path as journey with a partner to likely take that company and try to work, but yet have Micron continued to manufacture the product, at least in the foreseeable future.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Yahoo: Micron reported its quarterly results today. Sales of CMOS image sensors in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 increased slightly compared to the third quarter and represented 12 percent of the company’s total sales in the fourth quarter. The company’s gross margin on sales of imaging products during the fourth quarter decreased to 29 percent compared to 35 percent in the third quarter, primarily due to lower average selling prices.

DPReview published an interview with Choong-hyun Hwang, Vice President of the Digital Camera Business of Samsung Techwin Strategy Marketing Team. There are few interesting bits on DSC image sensors from Samsung Techwin point of view:

DPReview: On your compact cameras do you use your own sensors?

Samsung: No, we don't.

DPR: Would there be any advantage to developing your own compact sensors?

S: In terms of efficiency we're better at the moment outsourcing. We currently buy sensors from a range of suppliers.

DPR: Do you make any compact camera sensors?

S: No, at the moment we don't.

DPR: Do you think that CMOS is likely to eventually take over from CCD sensors in compacts?

S: Ah you are asking difficult questions! I think that many people - everyone - expects CMOS sensors to be applied to more compact cameras. Sony has a high speed CMOS sensor in development, and the speed is remarkable.

DPR: Is it less expensive to manufacture CMOS sensors?

S: Oh no, it's much more expensive. The Sony and Canon high speed CMOS sensors are very expensive to manufacture. The standard CMOS sensors used in mobile phones are very small and are inexpensive, but not those for compacts cameras. Canon has been making a lot of effort to replace CCD with CMOS, and they have not yet been successful because the performance and efficiency aren't good enough yet.

Video/Imaging Design Line: A partnership of Silicon Hive and Acutelogic spawned a new family of HiveGo programmable camera imaging subsystems (CSS) for SoC manufacturers in the mobile phone and consumer electronics space.

The three initial products offered as licensable IP are:

HiveGo CSS 3016J which targets DSC, DVC and UMPC cameras, incorporates Silicon Hive's 3rd generation HiveFlex ISP 2300 scalable SIMD processor, a control processor, and accelerators for filters, scaling, smooth digital zoom, and distortion correction. The hardware configuration yields ultra-high quality still capture at up to 260 Mega Pixels per second, or 16MP at 15 frames per second (fps) 'on the fly,' or capturing and processing HD video streams at 1080p 60fps. Camera input formats such as SMIA-CCP2 and MIPI-CS12 are supported. Robust GPIO connections for camera systems controls such as lens, focus, and flash are included.

Yahoo: Advanced Wafer Level Packaging Inc. (AWLP) has licensed the full range of SHELLCASE image sensor packaging technologies from Tessera, including the SHELLCASE MVP solution, which is one of the industry’s first Through Silicon Via (TSV) solutions.

AWLP is an early-stage start-up company based in Seoul, Korea. The new outsource packaging company will be dedicated to providing SHELLCASE packaging services to semiconductor manufacturing companies. AWLP was established in 2007 as a foundry service provider dedicated to Tessera WLCSP technology. AWLP’s facility is now being built in Kwangju City and will begin production by the end of 1Q09.

Yahoo: Fujitsu Microelectronics' Milbeaut chipsets incorporate the FotoNation FaceTracker image enhancement solution from Tessera. The FotoNation FaceTracker solution tracks faces in the camera viewfinder, detecting more than 10 faces in one image in as little as 0.1 seconds. It continues to track them moving throughout the image, even in rotation or profile. The camera uses this “face data” to adjust image capture settings such as exposure and focus, which results in human subjects that are well-lit and well-focused, even when backlit or off-center. The technology also includes face orientation data as a simple solution for auto-rotation without additional hardware.

PhysOrg: The new imaging technique reported by UCLA postdoctoral fellow Keisuke Goda, graduate researcher Kevin K. Tsia and electrical engineering professor Bahram Jalali uses a phenomenon known as amplified dispersive Fourier transform to read bar codes at a frame rate of 25 MHz — about a 1,000 times faster than current technology.

The new technology, dubbed the CWEETS Scanner (chirped wavelength electronic encoded time domain sampling), first maps the one-dimensional bar code image onto the spectrum of an ultrashort laser pulse and then maps that into an amplitude-modulated waveform that is captured with a single optical-to-electrical converter. This is in stark contrast to typical camera-based bar code readers, which require many optical-to-electrical converters — in other words, an array of pixels — to capture the image. The new imager requires only a single pixel and is free of mechanically moving parts.

"Today, the major difference in usage between CMOS and CCD cameras for machine vision occurs in situations where light levels are very low. In those cases, you still need CCD sensor technology because it is more sensitive to light: The minimum sensitivity for CCD cameras is 1 lux, but for CMOS it’s 5 to 10 lux.

But if there’s sufficient illumination during inspection, CMOS camera performance is excellent. And that’s the case with the majority of machine-vision applications, since they are usually well lighted. Also, some applications that need a higher near-infrared response, like about 900 to 1000 nm, will require CCD cameras, because those cameras are more sensitive at a higher spectrum.

CMOS sensors are less expensive than their CCD counterparts. So, for some customers, if CMOS technology meets their sensitivity needs, that’s what they will use. But at least as important is the ability of CMOS cameras to increase frame rates by letting users choose a smaller, lower-resolution area within the image."